I don't think spammers will last long, not with a ￡50 basic box price and a ￡9 sub to lose when they get reported and banned. They won't be able to maintain a continuous supply of hacked accounts, either.

Free-to-play games don't have more gold-sellers than pay-to-play games.

If that were true, WoW wouldn't have a gold-selling issue.

Alliance points> gold honestly only thing you buy with gold is mounts and respecs pretty much everything else you can craft, oh yeah and lock picks

Yeah there's no stopping them short of having active real time GMs on the job.

Alliance points> gold honestly only thing you buy with gold is mounts and respecs pretty much everything else you can craft, oh yeah and lock picks also basic wow is like $10

The reasons you see gold spammers in those games are:

a. no actions are taken against them

b. there are ways to create fake accounts

WoW has trial accounts and RiFT is f2p. RiFT has/had a play as guest feature with chat access (no idea if it was fixed) so figure it the spam chaos.

If ESO stays subscription based (without trial accounts) and GMs ban gold spammers, this won't be a massive problem. The only suicidal gold spammers you'll see will be from hacked accounts, stolen CC's used to BUY the game.

Better start checking the OP's PC ASAP.

i think that in some games the company has actually been getting cuts from the gold sale

i just cant believe they can be so incompetent when it comes to stopping it

if all gold spammers are permabanned a few mins after their first spam, then they have to sell a lot of gold just to buy new accounts

i dont even think they can capture many custumors with the gold spam, i would never buy from a company i hate with a passion

if i wanted to buy gold i would likely do a web search, then again i have never really been in need of extra gold in mmorpg's

They don't buy accounts, they steal (hack) them.

So much misinformation in one post. So in order:

-No, they aren't getting a cut. Gold-sellers/buyers hurt the companies financially. They also prevent them from focusing on the parts of game development they want to focus on.

-It's not incompetence. Account compromises and gold-selling happen clientside. Unless the developers place a GM over the shoulder of every idiot playing the game, they can't stop people from clicking links.

-Gold-sellers don't buy accounts and if they ever pay for a subscription, it's using a stolen card.

-They may not get many willing customers with that spam, but they get plenty of gullible people going to their site just to "check it out". Then that person's account is compromised by the malware contracted from the site.

-And plenty of people feel like they'd like to circumvent the system, which is why gold-selling even exists.

So, in summary: the developers can only block bots and ban accounts as they find them. Which won't actually stop gold-sellers from doing their work, because bad players will continue to use them as long as the community turns a blind eye to their gold-buying activity.

Yeah you're never going to be able to totally get rid of them. As long as there are people who buy gold, and the ability to hack and comprise players accounts it will always exist. Also its not just gold buyers accounts that get hacked, its normal everyday legit players who's accounts are hacked as well. In fact you more likely I'd bet to get hacked if you never buy gold as its not very smart to hack the account of a customer.

lots of online games get ruined by goldspammers,Diablo 3 was flooded constantly with ads in chat

others as well

Dirty argonian hiding in the shades says: "Hey kid, want to buy some gold?". LOL

Players need to cooperate in this aspect and report any suspicious activity and web sites that offers this kinda of "service".

If you think about it:

If there was a way to stop them, several companies would have already implemented it. Otherwise, you have to believe that they secretly WANT the gold sellers in their game. It's either, or. Either: all game companies are the scum of the earth that for whatever reason like having gold sellers rampant in their game; Or, there's just no way to reliably stop them (that anyone's discovered).

I'm hoping they have player moderators (volunteers), that have the power to mute other players that have various options for muting other players. For example:

- 8 hour mute for 1st gold spam offence

- 16 hour for 2nd gold spam offence

- 24 hour for 3rd gold spam offence

- Temp perm mute for 4th offence, verified by Zenimax GM's before the mute is made perm.

(All versions of the ban would remove the users chat messages)

And a similar system for players who are offensive in chat, but with very strict guidelines given by Zenimax GM's as not to have "OP" player mods who ban because they disagree with someones political views, etc.

Edit - With the game being Buy to play then Sub, I doubt many gold farmers will re appear after a perm ban, maybe once or twice, but I doubt anymore times after that.

Even with trial accounts you can limit them to lower level zones like we are in beta. the end game zones are not in the stating area, WOW has an issue here where the hubs are the human and orc capitals in cataclysm, unlike the hubs in burning crusade and lich king where they was high level areas. Still gold spammers was rare in wow.

And you are right obviously they use hacked accounts. A bit strange they don't use them for advertising after clearing them.

Warning an major source of hacking is bot programs. You get some idiot to download an bot program, yes it can be something innocent like gathering materials while you sleep. Yes it works, it work very well until you reach high up in the endgame, suddenly you can not log in then you mange to reset password you are ribbed to the skin.

In WOW they was very nice the admins actually rolled back your character to before the takeover, however that depended on if you had used bots or not.

it is almost impossible to stop them. They are like cockroaches. Hard to kill. But there are plenty of ways to make their life easy or difficult. The more work and effort a gold seller is required to invest, the less likely they will persist.

Here is a list of things ESO has going for it in the war against Gold selling Scum.

1. They are easy to block. - Some games actualy require you to type a name in order to block it. You can imagine how difficult this can be.

2. Blocking a name also blocks the account. - This will require them to constantly hack or start a different account rather than just use a different name.

3. Subscription model. - Sub based games generally have better game support and GMs. And while I have nothing against kids, they tend to be the biggest target because they don't know any better. There are less kids playing a sub model than F2P.

4. No Auction House. - While your opinion on this issue may or may not support this, the fact remains that Bots and Multi-box programs are the bread and butter of a gold farmer. The guild store system in ESO will make it more difficult to sell their wares in large bulk. Which is the main way they get their gold to sell.

They will be around. But it should be tolerable.

Every one of these things add up. Several games have none of these roadblocks and they are so littered with spam that they are unplayable unless you turn your chat off.

There is no AH, limited bag space, and lots of variety in materials. Resource bots and slave labor will need to be leveled up enough to get keen eye, making them ineffective without a major time investment, and there is no AH for bots to manipulate. In short even if they hack accounts to drain and farm with, the reward will not be worth the time invested. Sure a few will try, but with basic ignore and report features they are gone in minutes in most games today. I do hope that ZOS goes deeper than most games and bans gold buyers if they are caught. Also let's not forget there is a huge difference between the sites setup before game launch that only a complete idiot would buy from, and in game sellers which don't exist yet. I have seen questions asked in forums that could only have been attempts at finding a way to sell gold, and it has been pathetic. They seemed desperate, so I am guessing the hopes of many gold farmers have been dashed concerning ESO. That leaves the websites for stupid people to visit, get hacked and then hopefully banned. If I am wrong I'll buy sweetrolls for everyone who can find me in game.

Quite the opposite actually. Not only do they have an Auction House... but now they will have one of their very own.

This is one of those problems where attacking it might be what makes it worse. I have no problem with the simple act of people selling gold. Its the fact that they spam the channel and often do disreputable things, like steal accounts, that make them scum. All the efforts at banning gold selling might have somthing to do with that. I guess when you criminalize selling gold, only criminals sell gold.